


juicebox hero

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: NCT (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Implied Sexual Content, Lee Seokmin | DK-centric, M/M, Post-Break Up, Post-Graduation, set in Los Angeles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-27 08:51:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18735700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: "Of course," Seokmin readily agrees, trying not to think about how Johnny's standing right where Jaehyun pushed him up against the fridge door once, pulled his gym shorts to his ankles as soon as he put the groceries down on the counter, and sucked him off to the rhythm of the song coming through Seokmin's airpods. Not weird at all. "I mean," he laughs nervously. "What's the use of making things weird?"





	juicebox hero

**Author's Note:**

> written for eyes shut - years & years. when i first listened to this song, it was a huge emotional punch in the gut and i hope this fic can create even a fraction of that catharsis ♡ [here's](https://open.spotify.com/user/iverins/playlist/78DTd4n08VjlGC2NqOqAV1?si=CRUettr4RGOzQ386HlgDew) a playlist to accompany your read.
> 
> thank you so much to the mods for organizing another round of jukebox (and being patient with me TT) ♡♡♡

Seokmin closes his eyes the moment Jaehyun gets off the phone.

Jaehyun, for the record, takes his time to come around. Closes the bedroom door with a creak, goes through the kitchen to grab a glass of water, downs maybe half of that, and then pads over the ratty carpet to where Seokmin's laying on the couch. By the time Seokmin can see the shadow of his silhouette through the fleshy pink of his closed lids, it's like he can pretend he's actually fallen asleep to the sound of Rachel Ray cooking a thirty-minute meal on their tiny TV.

"Hey," Jaehyun says, finally. Seokmin can hear the smile in his voice, and it makes the corners of his own mouth want to twitch upward. "Sleepyhead," he continues when Seokmin doesn't open his eyes, pushing his legs off the side to carve out a space for himself.

He cracks an eye open at that. "You're mean," he groans, rubbing his face with his hands. When he looks at Jaehyun again, the weird LA sunset seeping through their broken blinds casts an amber halo around his flyaways. It's like, in that cardboard punch-out of the sun replaced with Jaehyun's laughing face, there's an artificial celestial in the midst of their living room, microscopic in terms with the rest of the universe.

Well, celestial or not, Jaehyun concedes and manhandles Seokmin's legs back onto the sofa, over his lap. His hands are warm where they make contact with Seokmin's bare ankles. "Long day at work?" he asks. Jaehyun's hands are always warm.

"Mm," Seokmin replies, in lieu of putting the actual experience in words. He stretches his neck, stares at the popcorn ceiling. Now, admittedly, he's feeling a little sleepy. "Who were you talking to?"

Jaehyun nudges the underside of Seokmin's knees as he shifts in his seat. "Johnny," he says. _Oh._ "I invited him over for dinner. You don't mind, do you?"

"'Course not," Seokmin laughs, but suddenly it's like he's hyper aware of every part of his body that's touching Jaehyun's. Like someone flipped the switch labeled _Johnny Seo,_ whose Facebook friend request that came through a month ago Seokmin only accepted last week, and then sitting on the sofa with Jaehyun like this becomes something else entirely. "Do you need me to like," he pauses. "Um."

"No, no way!" Jaehyun blurts quickly. Seokmin nods to urge him on. "We're...not there yet."

"Cool," he breathes. The sun's almost been entirely swallowed by the clouds, the gold folding into the navy of dusk. One of them should turn the lights on. "Cool," as if repeating it makes it all the more better.

Jaehyun exhales. Presses his lips into a line. They're silent for a good ten minutes after that, watching as Rachel Ray races against the clock to finish a heaping plate of pasta. A spring digs into Seokmin's lower back.

"Knew you were faking it," Jaehyun tells him. Seokmin's heart thuds five times before he gets why he's smiling.

"You always know, don't you?" Seokmin says back, ignoring the cacophony going on in his chest. He rolls off the couch and walks over to the kitchen to get the light switch. "You always fucking know."

The lights are, in that moment, very, very bright.

 

 

 

You know, Seokmin thinks that maybe what it really comes down to is this:

"I want crown moldings," Jaehyun insists when they start looking for an apartment together for their senior year.

Seokmin looks up from where he's got a number of listings pulled up on his laptop screen. "What?" he asks, not sure if he heard him right.

"Crown moldings," Jaehyun repeats. He catches the straw of his iced coffee between his teeth. "Our apartment has to have crown moldings."

Whereas Seokmin grew up in a suburb forty-five minutes away from their uni without traffic, approaching two hours with, Jaehyun's all the way from Hartford. And Seokmin's not an expert on the housing market, but he grew up in a house with popcorn ceilings thinking _that_ was fancy for SoCal architecture, so maybe the moldings are just an East Coast thing. He puts it in the search bar and clicks on the image results. "We can try," he shrugs as he scrolls through, and Jaehyun's face lights up at that.

Jaehyun's face also lights up the day they view the apartment they eventually sign the lease for, when he sees the moldings in the single bedroom. And the day they haul Seokmin's old bunk bed frame up the two flights of stairs and clip said moldings off the side of the doorway, which they think is downright hilarious until Mingyu tells them they could get asbestos exposure, and then they have to pay for someone to repair it before their landlady notices.

Or maybe it's this:

Seokmin skirts around talking about their future the way like poles on magnets scientifically refuse to stick together. Which is how after a particularly busy week during their senior year in which neither of them really come back to the apartment, Seokmin’s greeted by an AUTOMATIC LEASE RENEWAL notice stuck to their front door in the aftermath. Which is how Seokmin and Jaehyun are still living together right now.

But maybe it's _really_ this:

Seokmin and Jaehyun broke up three months ago. And, as mentioned above, Seokmin and Jaehyun are still living together right now.

Yeah. _Maybe._

 

  

 

"Are you not coming over tomorrow?"

Mingyu looks up from the _soondubu jjigae_ he's just burned his tongue on. Seokmin continues, "Did you forget?" He reaches across the table for more fishcake, shiny from sesame oil under the restaurant's fluorescent lights. "Monthly game night? At me and Jaehyun's?" Mingyu raises his eyebrows. "Shit, did I forget to invite you to the Facebook event again?"

"No," Mingyu tells him, holding a hand up. Seokmin pauses from where he'd unlocked his phone. "I got it." He challenges another spoonful of the stew and hisses from the heat again. "I'm just not going."

"What? Why?" Mingyu's been his best friend since they were born, basically – they'd stuck it out through Saturdays of Korean school together, went to the same high school, suffered through the same uncurved Stats lectures in uni, and, by some stroke of luck, wound up in the same analytics team at work. Seokmin's partly convinced that they're going to die together in the same nursing home once it comes time for them to kick the bucket, too. "We just got Mario Party for the Switch!"

And then it dawns on him. "Is this because," Seokmin lowers his voice, "we forgot to buy your cheese puffs last time? I'm really sorry about that, you know."

Mingyu chokes on his water. "What?" The couple seated beside them gives him a look at the outburst. Seokmin offers an apologetic smile. "No, it's not because _you forgot to buy my cheese puffs last time._ " He slams his metal cup onto the table, an ice cube flying out and crash-landing into Seokmin's rice bowl. "Maybe it's because I wanna boycott the fact that you guys broke up months ago and _act like it never even happened?_ "

Seokmin takes a moment, stares at the ice cube. Reaches for more fishcake. "Oh," he says, instead of defending himself. He's always been more of the punching bag, doormat with _please, walk all over me!_ written in all-caps, kind of person. "It's really not a big deal."

"Seok," Mingyu sighs. "How are you going to get over him if you see him every single day?"

"We're just friends again, okay?" Mingyu looks thoroughly unconvinced. "And we've been seeing other people. You know, Johnny even came over last week."

Mingyu sips another spoonful of his stew cautiously, before shoving another, less carefully, into his mouth. "And how did that go?"

"Good." As in, Seokmin was pulling on his shoes at the doorway, ready to stall at the nearby Starbucks until Johnny left, and then Jaehyun stopped him. "Hey, Seok!" he'd called from where he was leaning over the counter that separated their tiny kitchen from their tiny living room. "Johnny cooked way too much food. You should eat with us. Right, babe?"

Seokmin looked up from his shoelaces just as Johnny nodded with a grin, just as Seokmin remembered that nickname wasn't his anymore. "By the way, thanks for accepting my friend request, Seokmin!" Johnny said over the sound of something frying. Cue an awkward night in, exchanging pleasantries with his ex and his ex's new boyfriend, eating on chipped plates over their hand-me-down coffee table while sitting on the floor that Seokmin forgot to mop that week.

Mingyu narrows his eyes at him. "He makes a mean chicken parm," Seokmin concludes.

"You know," Mingyu starts over the clamor of employees stacking empty bowls into a bin at a nearby table and a waitress yelling orders to the kitchen. "Messy break-ups are scary. But you and Jaehyun," he trails off, thinking. "It's like a ticking time bomb."

Seokmin shrugs, reaching for more fishcake. The little dish is empty. Instead of replying to Mingyu, he waves over an employee and orders more.

 

 

  

There was this week or two after their graduation last year, when all their other neighbors had moved out for the summer, that he and Jaehyun fucked on every possible surface of their apartment. It was like after all the months of pent-up stress and being unable to spend as much time together as they used to leading up to it, they were completely starved of each other's existence, and the singular way to satiate that hunger was to have sex. Constantly.

Presently, Seokmin is making a PB&J after an upsetting early knock out of the Mario Kart tournament, right where he nailed Jaehyun approximately ten months ago.

"Hey, Seokmin," Johnny says, leaning against the doorway to the kitchen. He's so tall that the exercise bar they'd jammed at the top of it and subsequently never used covers part of his forehead. "Mind if I join you?"

Seokmin shakes his head and gestures. "No, no, feel free!" He looks down at his own sandwich, and then the scrapes of peanut butter left on the sides of the jar. "Did you want one, too?"

Johnny lets out a short bark of laughter. "Nah, I'm good." He ducks his head under the bar and examines the year-old notices taped up on their refrigerator that they keep forgetting to recycle.

"You're out of the tournament, too?" Seokmin asks, taking a bite out of his sandwich. The bread tastes a little stale.

"Yeah," Johnny exhales. "Did you know Jaehyun plays dirty? He red shelled me right before the finish line." He shrugs in disbelief.

"He's super competitive," Seokmin sympathizes, taking another bite. "Not to mention, a sore loser."

"I can see that." An awkward bout of silence stretches between them uncomfortably like a pulled, over-chewed piece of gum, all the flavor sucked out of it. "You know, I know you and Jaehyun have..." he takes a beat to choose the right word, " _history,_ " he finally decides on. Seokmin does his best not to wince. "But I really appreciate that things don't have to be weird between us because of it."

"Of course," Seokmin readily agrees, trying not to think about how Johnny's standing right where Jaehyun pushed him up against the fridge door once, pulled his gym shorts to his ankles as soon as he put the groceries down on the counter, and sucked him off to the rhythm of the song coming through Seokmin's airpods. Not weird at all. "I mean," he laughs nervously. "What's the use of making things weird?"

Johnny reaches over to clap him on the back. "Exactly!" he grins. "Man, I wish all my exes were as chill as you."

"Oh." Seokmin can hear Sicheng’s frenzied shouting in the living room over Jaehyun groaning _fuck!_ "Cool," as if saying it makes it all the more better.

"Well," Johnny says, standing up straight. "I should probably go check on that," he signals with a thumb to the living room. "But it was great talking to you, Seokmin."

"Likewise," he responds faintly just as Johnny's walked out with a, "Babe, you alright?" and a tickle of laughter in his voice.

Alone in the kitchen again, part of Seokmin wishes Mingyu were here. The other part of Seokmin gets why he didn't come in the first place. He doesn't really want to be here either. He stuffs the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and tries not to dwell on that.

  

 

 

It's not like Seokmin doesn't go on dates anymore. Seokmin _totally_ goes on dates.

Three weeks ago there was Yibo, one of Minghao and Sicheng's mutual friends, who took him out for drinks and then back to his apartment, gave Seokmin great head, and hasn't contacted him since. And the month before that there was this guy named Chris, with the cute Australian accent and hectic med school schedule who ended things with _I feel like it's not fair to you that you have to keep making plans around me_ and a well-meaning _you deserve so much better ):_ that made Seokmin feel like the guilty one anyway.

And before _that_ was – rewind all the way back to the summer before junior year – _Jaehyun,_ and Seokmin spilled Sprite onto his crotch during a sorry attempt of reaching for his hand halfway through _Spider-Man: Homecoming._ They made out in the bathroom in between trying to clean that up and only managed to sneak back into the theater for the post-credits scenes. Seokmin finally got around to watching the end of it on Mingyu's Netflix account a couple days ago.

And as for Date #4:

“This place is really nice,” Mina says once they've been seated. He glances at the _Hi, I’m Mina :)_ tag still pinned onto her scrubs. “Maybe _too_ nice. I swear the waiter gave me a weird look when they called our number.”

Seokmin could mention that he only chose this place because it had the highest rating on Yelp aside from the In-N-Out down the street, and they both agreed that there were less chances of running into old college acquaintances at a fancy sit-down. Instead he insists with a shake of his head, “Don’t worry about it, you look great.”

Mina laughs a little at that, causing the candle between them to flicker. “Thanks, Seokmin,” she smiles. It’s so much like when they were freshmen, saving seats for each other in lecture, that Seokmin’s thrown for a moment. Except both Mina and Seokmin switched out of PoliSci after first semester, and Jaehyun, the one who’d actually stuck with it, was usually playing some word matching game on his phone if he wasn’t sleeping through class, and Seokmin hasn’t seen Mina since they were sophomores, when they ran into each other at the library after she’d just cut her hair to her shoulders.

Seokmin, at that point in time, had also been nurturing the biggest crush on Jaehyun for the better part of the year. That’s beside the point, though.

 _Hey! :D,_ Mina sent him a week ago over Tinder. Seokmin made it a thing to swipe right on people he knew after watching Mingyu, over his shoulder during a project meeting, go left on his profile. _Crazy seeing you here! I thought you were still with Jaehyun?_

And that’s how Seokmin’s sitting across from her right now, scanning the menu for burgers after a sudden moment of craving. And after their conversation on Mina’s nursing internship and Seokmin’s job runs dry, things naturally devolve into Mina asking: “So, how’s Jaehyun doing?”

He takes a breath. “Good.” _God,_ the cheapest burger’s sixteen bucks. “He’s doing law school now,” at their old uni, and the one time Seokmin risked parking Jaehyun’s car in one of those spots reserved for Nobel Laureates to pick him up after class on a day off, he realized he’d never actually been to that part of campus in all his four years. “He’s got a new boyfriend,” Seokmin adds, as lightly as he can. Exhales. “He seems happy.”

Speaking of the devil: “Hot date tonight?” Jaehyun had kidded from where he was sprawled out on the couch, watching the Iron Chef episode Seokmin had left playing as he got ready.

"It's Mina," he corrected, re-doing the buttons on his shirt after going one off. "And that's my sweater, you know."

Jaehyun looked down at it. A lethargic grin spread its way across his face. “Looks better on me,” he said a little too easily. A little too much like he used to joke before Seokmin would counter with something like _you look better without it_ back when they were still together, and that usually ended with Jaehyun mouthing down Seokmin’s neck when he wasn't whispering _I really fucking love you._ Now, they both freeze at the familiarity.

“I’ve gotta go,” Seokmin blurted suddenly, lacing up his dress shoes. And then Jaehyun said _tell Mina I said hi,_ and Seokmin realized halfway down the block, shoes pinching at his toes, that he’d put on a pair of Jaehyun’s instead.

Mina nods once, slowly. And, as if sensing his discomfort, does a complete one-eighty. “Do you think if we walked out now,” she whispers, leaning forward and causing the candle flame to oscillate even more dangerously, “That they’d still charge us for the waters? I’m actually kind of craving animal-style fries.”

Seokmin feels the knot in his chest loosen, unwind. He laughs, genuine. “Say no more.”

"You know,” he tells her a chocolate milkshake, a Double-Double, and fries doused in ketchup later. The sun’s long disappeared, but the street lights are so bright on the main road that it’s almost as if dusk has been suspended in a highly viscous, purple-tinted vacuum of time. “We should do this again.”

Mina looks up at him, regarding him carefully. The crosswalk signal’s just gone green, but she pauses. “As friends?” she asks with a small smile. “Or as a date?”

A car honks beside them before speeding around the corner. Seokmin opens and closes his mouth once. He doesn’t know the answer to that, right or wrong. “Whatever you want it to be,” he tries.

Mina presses her lips together. Not unpleasantly or disappointed or anything like that. Just...unreadable. “I don’t think you’re ready,” she starts. The corners of her mouth pull up into that small smile again. “I don’t think you’re ready to be over Jaehyun,” like a punch to the gut.

“Oh,” is all Seokmin can really say. And Mina’s always been beautiful, but she’s most beautiful like this: tip-toeing to press a gentle kiss against his cheek in her scrubs that now smell like burger grease, trying to hand back the bloody mess of his heart in her cupped palms. And staring at it out in the open, Seokmin realizes that part of it’s still missing, and that part is lying in his old sweater on that beaten-up sofa with a lazy smile that simultaneously tugs at Jaehyun’s mouth and Seokmin’s heartstrings, unable to forget this kind of learned behavior for someone who isn't even his anymore.

Mina reaches for his hand. Squeezes it once. “Thanks for dinner.” She lets go, and his hand goes slack with nothing to hold onto. “Good night, Seokmin,” she tells him, walks across the street, and doesn’t turn back. She makes it look easy.

In the aftermath it’s just Seokmin, the night, and his heart bleeding on the sidewalk over chewed-up pieces of gum stuck to the concrete. He wiggles his toes in Jaehyun’s too-tight dress shoes for a moment. And then he starts back home, hands in his pockets, the evening air bone-dry, completely and utterly alone.

 

 

  

"Dude, that's fucked up," is what Mingyu says the night Seokmin shows up on his doorstep with a sleeping bag tucked under his right arm, the headlights of the Uber he took disappearing down the street, after he came home from work to Jaehyun sitting on his bed with his head in his hands telling him, _I think we should end things._

In retrospect, maybe it was. A little. It'd been Valentine's Day, and Jaehyun's a Valentine's baby, which just made Seokmin's hopeless-romanticism pop a boner. Which also made it all the more easier for some unseen force of the universe, knowing that, to throw it all back into his face like a sick joke. In the moment, Seokmin just shrugs, sets up camp on Mingyu's loveseat and replies, "I guess."

The end, though, in all honesty, is a bit of an amorphous thing. There's the time Jaehyun comes home past midnight in the middle of their last term, stares at Seokmin after slamming the door shut behind him, and says, still standing in the midst of their shoes piled at the doorway, "I'm going back to Hartford after graduation."

"What?" Seokmin hears his own voice like it's out of sync with his mouth. Overlayed with that is the sound of his heart, crowding out everything else, beating in tandem with a rhythmic translation of fear.

Jaehyun rubs at his jaw with the heel of his palm. "I'm going back to Hartford," he repeats slowly, crouching down to slide off his sneakers. "After graduation." He doesn't stand back up even after he's slipped off the heels, just squats there staring at the space between one of Seokmin's old Birkenstocks and one of their dress shoes, its twin lost in the flood of all their other footwear.

"Tell me," he starts again quietly as Seokmin just stares at him. "That you don't want me to go." Presses his mouth into a close-lipped smile. "And I won't."

"Of course I don't want you to go," Seokmin tells him. "Of course I don't want you to go," and Jaehyun walks over to the sofa at that, pressing their foreheads together before he meets his lips, licking languidly into Seokmin's mouth as easily as he handed him the right words to say.

And there's the time they're at this party right after they started going out, wine-drunk and standing outside. "I liked you," Seokmin slurs, hands pressed against Jaehyun's chest. "I've liked you for so long, do you know that?"

Jaehyun laughs when Seokmin reaches up to poke his pinky into one of his dimples. "I really like you too, Seokmin," and then he kisses him. It makes Seokmin forget how everyone told him that he's in over his head, having his first big relationship be with someone he liked maybe too much.

And there's the fact that neither of them are out to their parents, so calling home two times a week always warrants this:

"And how's your roommate doing?" his mom asks. It's not like Seokmin lives so far that he can't afford to visit his family at least once a month, but that promise slowly turns into twice a semester, and then _when I have time,_ which, as it turns out, is close to never. Like the distance makes him a better, more hard-working son.

"Jaehyun's good," Seokmin says some variation of every time. Or, on the rare occasion Jaehyun stops by to thank her for the home-cooked meal she packed an extra portion of into their fridge, he tells her himself. When he overhears Jaehyun's FaceTimes with his own parents, their conversations follow an uncannily similar pattern.

But after the true, clean-cut end of it: Jaehyun happens to be home the morning Seokmin comes back to their apartment. He's sitting in front of the TV, flipping through the cable channels that Seokmin insisted they get because he couldn't live without the Food Network. Jaehyun laughed about it the first time he brought it up, pressed a kiss to the side of Seokmin's mouth and murmured, "I love that about you," into it.

Now, Jaehyun says, "Hi."

It's casual. Friendly, even. As if less than forty-eight hours ago, he didn't hold Seokmin's heart back out to him with a _I don't think I love you like you love me anymore_ and when Seokmin didn't move, let it fall onto the floor and smash into a thousand tiny pieces that're still strewn all over this shitty apartment of theirs.

"Hi," Seokmin echoes. He clutches his sleeping bag a little closer to his chest.

Jaehyun takes a deep breath. "Listen," he starts. "I can move out. I know our lease is until August, but I can find someone to sublet..." Pauses. "Because even though I wanna stay friends, I'm okay if you don't."

Logistically speaking, it's easier to live together. They're a walking distance away from law school campus and there's a bus two blocks away that drops Seokmin off right in front of his office. Emotionally speaking – "No," Seokmin tells him. "It's fine."

Jaehyun opens his mouth to say something like _are you sure?_ "Don't even worry about it," Seokmin gets in before he can't.

 

 

  

Maybe the fucked-up thing is actually this:

Seokmin, to the surprise of no one, is still in love with Jaehyun.

Yeah. _Maybe._

 

 

  

Seokmin wakes up to someone turning on the lights.

"Shit," Jaehyun mutters, kicking aside some of their shoes. When Seokmin turns his head to check the time on the cable box, it feels heavy and his mouth dry – the tell-tale signs of an accidental nap gone on too long. _11:13._

Jaehyun stumbles to the kitchen, puts a mug under the tap, and gulps it down. "Shit," he says again, sounding drunk and a little pathetic.

"Everything alright?" Seokmin calls from the couch. He nearly falls off it reaching for the remote to turn down the volume of the Iron Chef episode playing on the TV, slips halfway there and decides to just get up and check on Jaehyun anyway. He laughs when he finds him hunched over the kitchen sink. "I thought you said you were too old for college parties," he jokes, moving to rub his back.

Jaehyun relaxes into it. "I am," he groans into his arm. "But Johnny had this friend..." he trails off, shaking his head. "My skull feels like it's gonna explode."

"Remember when you rushed for that frat freshman year?" Seokmin says. He dumps out the tap water from Jaehyun's mug and pulls the Brita from the fridge. "And you showed up late to PoliSci discussion every Friday? _And_ hungover."

Jaehyun laughs weakly, readjusting to lean heavily against the countertop. "You loved me anyway," he retorts by habit.

Seokmin smiles, close-lipped, hands him the mug. There's silence for a beat as Jaehyun downs the water. "Yeah, I did," he says quietly.

More silence. The light from their living room peripherally illuminates the kitchen, sets Jaehyun's skin a dark kind of honey. "Me and Johnny," Jaehyun starts. "We had a fight tonight."

Seokmin stops to look at him from where he was closing the refrigerator door. "It was so stupid," Jaehyun continues, grinning a little to himself. "Sometimes I just feel so..." he searches for the right word, " _young,_ or something. Like he'll talk to me as if I didn't think about something and _I didn't,_ but instead of admitting it, I just get," Seokmin watches as Jaehyun presses the heel of his palm against one of his eyes, "fucking _angry._ And I know it's stupid, but I do it anyway." He sighs, meets Seokmin's eyes. "It's my fault, isn't it?"

If you asked Seokmin back during freshman year what he liked so much about Jaehyun, he would've said something shallow like, _he's hot._ Fast-forward a year and half and that point still stood, but there were also the late-night conversations they'd have in the stairwell of their dorm building, talking about how they felt they'd never be able to reconcile who they really were with their obligations to their parents as second generation immigrants, and the times Jaehyun screwed his eyes closed but talked about his failures and apologized for them, and the days Jaehyun turns to Seokmin and, apropos of nothing, tells him, "You're the only one for me," with so much lawyerly conviction that Seokmin believed it with his entire being, down to his bones.

"You can always apologize," Seokmin says after swallowing. The cooks on Iron Chef are arguing about the best way to section a whole fish, and it's deafening compared to the quiet between them.

"You know," Jaehyun shakes his head. "It's like...things were so easy between us. Like, we were meant to be, perfect for each other." He presses his palms against the countertop, bracing all his weight on it before refocusing his gaze on Seokmin. "Why can't we just go back to that?"

And if Seokmin's metaphorical heart has already been shattered into a thousand pieces, and then painstakingly glued back together only to go through a meat pulverizer, and then reconstructed once again to be thrown onto the 405 during rush hour, trampled over the tires of hundreds of cars, this is when it actually, truly breaks within him. "You can't say that," he begins shakily. _No,_ "You don't get to say something that you don’t even mean and not expect me to take you back. That's just – "

One of the cooks on their tiny TV screen finally says, _You have to cut it off!_

He takes a watery breath. " – _fucked up,_ Jaehyun."

 

 

  

And walking in the smoggy, LA midnight, Seokmin realizes that what it actually boils down to is this:

"Shit, Seokmin," Jaehyun calls after him as he walks out the door. "Seokmin! At least put on some goddamn shoes!"

He thought, for the longest time, that he and Jaehyun were an inevitability. Stick them together long enough, and they'd be pulled back to one another eventually. The problem is, Jaehyun thought that too.

Contrary to how easy Mina made it look, not turning back is the hardest part. The sidewalk through Seokmin's socks is ice cold.

 

 

  

In love or out of it, life goes on.

"Wanna grab dinner?" Mingyu asks, leaning over the divider of his cubicle right as Seokmin's clocking out. “I'm meeting up with Minghao and Jieqiong at that new Sichuan restaurant."

Seokmin doesn't know how to say no, or that if he doesn't leave in the next five minutes, he'll miss the five o'clock bus that gets him back to where he's crashing at Mingyu's just in time for the latest episode of 30 Minute Meals. "I'll pay for the cable bill," Seokmin told an affronted Mingyu after he called the company to set it up last week.

He guesses the answer must be showing on his face, because Mingyu throws his hands up in surrender. "Alright, I'll see you at home, then," he shoots over his shoulder as he starts down the aisle. "I'll make sure to grab you something!"

It's not like Seokmin expected his world to stop at the end of it all. It was more like: Seokmin never thought much about the beyond of university, or Jaehyun, or at least having Jaehyun in his life, friend or more or not. And now that he's living in it, Seokmin's taken up putting on a new podcast every commute home, lost in favor of off-the-rails thinking about _now what?_

There's other things, too. Getting used to Mingyu's weekly cleaning routine, staring at Mina and Chris and even Yibo's contact information, trying to think of something to say other than sorry. Text messages from Jaehyun every two days since the night Seokmin walked out that he hasn't replied to.

"Good riddance," Mingyu had said after the first day, loading a new stock of tissue boxes from Costco into the pantry. Seokmin had single-handedly demolished his previous stash and cited allergies every time he was asked about his puffy eyes at work. "He doesn't deserve you, Seok."

But it's not so much about who deserves who, or who was right and who was wrong, or there being some way to travel back into time and prevent everything from unraveling the way it did. It's like after all this time, Seokmin's built up this muscle memory around Jaehyun, and now that it's over and time to unlearn it, Seokmin doesn't know how to.

And he's about to get on the bus when:

 _> I know you're probably sick of hearing this but I'm sorry._  
_> You don't need to forgive me but I hope we can talk._  
_ > If you don't want to, I totally understand._

No call this time. Seokmin pauses and lets the lady behind him board first. Lets the five o'clock bus leave before he takes a deep inhale of the exhaust and sends back:

_> okay_

 

 

  

"Hey," Jaehyun says once he sees Seokmin, standing back up from where he was leaning against the pier railing.

Santa Monica's geographically not far, but the traffic's a bitch, and the sun's already started to dip beneath the clouds in the horizon. Seokmin spent the hour and a half on the bus trying to envision this moment and how awkward it would be, but right now, he can't help but grin back. "Hey yourself," he replies just as Jaehyun finally smiles back. "Remember the last time we came here?"

Jaehyun falls into rhythm with Seokmin's steps. "You mean last summer?" Seokmin nods. "When we made out in the sand and you got a hard-on from it?"

Seokmin shoves at his shoulder. For a beat, it's like nothing's changed – like they're still the same Seokmin and Jaehyun high off their sudden freedom as post-grads, still in love with each other in that all-consuming way young people have the capacity for, unafraid of anything. He retracts his hand. "Shut up," he manages to laugh.

Jaehyun laughs, too. After that peters out, they're silent for a bit, aside from the street performers dancing to some pop song that was everywhere two years ago. "I'm moving out," Jaehyun starts, just when the song changes. Seokmin turns his head to look at him and finds that Jaehyun's already looking back. "If you want the apartment. I'm just – I'm sorry, Seok, for what I said that night. It _was_ fucked up, and," he pushes his hair back, thinking.

Seokmin waits. "Honestly, I've thought about it," Jaehyun continues. "And it's like we broke up, cool, and we stayed friends after it, awesome, but we never really," he wets his lips before pressing them together, " _got over_ each other." He huffs out a laugh. "Or maybe it's just me. Like, I still don't know how to unlike you. If that makes sense."

Seokmin takes a deep breath. "No," he says. Lets it out. "Me too."

"And it's not like we were going to get back together?" Jaehyun tilts the end of the sentence up. Seokmin shakes his head.

"I think we both thought we would," Seokmin says. "Right? But not anymore." It comes out honest this time. Light.

"Not anymore," Jaehyun agrees. And from where he's turned toward the sky, the sunset splays its canvas of colors onto Jaehyun's face, and it reminds Seokmin that:

"I think," he starts again. And Jaehyun hasn't stopped looking at him, even though he's facing the sun. "Some part of me's always going to be at least a little in love with you." Seokmin swallows. "Or at least in love with the people we were when we were in love with each other."

"Yeah." The corner of Jaehyun's mouth pulls up into a lopsided, lethargic smile. "You know, people were always telling me that you liked me a lot more than I liked you but." The corner twitches downward for a moment before pulling back up. "I loved you a lot, Seokmin. A fuck ton."

The wind whips between them, flattening the collar of Seokmin's dress shirt against his cheek. And Seokmin hopes that it can carry those words all the way back to the Seokmin who couldn't say, "I know," like he tells Jaehyun now, mirroring his smile back to him.

 

 

  

So it really comes down to this:

The true, clean-cut end finally comes four months after they've broken up.

"We have to get out of that damn apartment," Seokmin jokes as they're walking back to where Jaehyun's parked his car, after he's told Jaehyun that he's going to move into Mingyu's studio for the time being, tight squeeze or not.

"Can you believe we fucked everywhere we possibly could in there?" Jaehyun laughs along, unlocking the doors. Seokmin shakes his head with a smile.

And this is the goodbye, Seokmin thinks they both understand. They go silent before Jaehyun reaches for Seokmin's left cheek, holding it feather-light against his palm. And right before Jaehyun leans in to press a chaste kiss against his mouth, Seokmin closes his eyes, and this moment's so heart-achingly intimate that Seokmin thinks he'll never forget it.

But the seasons change and the tides eat away at the sand. And they are over.

Seokmin opens his eyes. This, he thinks, deep breath, is the first step.

**Author's Note:**

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